Received my notebook from Asus a minute ago. The report said that they had change the thermal fan.

As suspected the fan on and off problem still occur with light use. Every time the cores hit 50 degrees the fans turn on. The biggest reason for the cores to hit 50 degrees is the Asus smart gesture drivers. Every time you scroll through a website or a document using 2-finger scrolling the cores hit at least 50 degrees. And since two-finger scrolling is a feature everyone use all the time, not wonder why the fans turn on and off every 5 second.

I will try to install NBFC and some new mouse drivers and see how that works out. If it doesnt work I will call Asus tomorrow.

Received my notebook from Asus a minute ago. The report said that they had change the thermal fan.

As suspected the fan on and off problem still occur with light use. Every time the cores hit 50 degrees the fans turn on. The biggest reason for the cores to hit 50 degrees is the Asus smart gesture drivers. Every time you scroll through a website or a document using 2-finger scrolling the cores hit at least 50 degrees. And since two-finger scrolling is a feature everyone use all the time, not wonder why the fans turn on and off every 5 second.

I will try to install NBFC and some new mouse drivers and see how that works out. If it doesnt work I will call Asus tomorrow.

WOW!!!! It's sad that this thread started in SEPTEMBER.. It's February..6 months..half a year!
is ASUS doing? I sure as hell hope they came across this thread...if they did, shame on them. If they didn't, shame on them.

This is outright ridiculous. My Zenbook gives the same issue. Still not even a fix, heck even a message or update. I think ASUS has almost lost me as a customer. Laptops are no good if they only have looks and no performance.

Spoke with ASUS Sweden today and the guy I spoke with had not heard about this issue.
Told them about this thread. The only solution they had was RMA. Maybe they know about the problem but don't want to talk about it officially or they are just stupid..

Spoke with ASUS Sweden today and the guy I spoke with had not heard about this issue.
Told them about this thread. The only solution they had was RMA. Maybe they know about the problem but don't want to talk about it officially or they are just stupid..

I'm calling Asus tomorrow for a new computer or if i am lucky my money back. So disappointed about this notebook. After spending an entire evening right next to my friends Macbook air which was completely silent, had a much better touchpad and much better battery life, I must admit that the Zenbook is not worth 1300 euro.

Think I'm goanna go with the Samsung Series 9 or the Lenovo x1 carbon.

I'm having the same problem too. Brand new UX32VD, bought today (though one of the screws is lose, so it might be returned unit), same problem. I tried some of the stuff here, but none helpled. So I'll be returning it either tomorow or on monday.

Does anyone know, if ux31a have the same problem? I might drop the dedicated graphics, upgradeable hdd and ram for silence.

It's really sad. While the touchpad is nothing to write home about, the notebook is really beautiful, and the screen is perfect. I have never seen prettier computer screen. But this crazy vacuum machine sound every ten seconds is not worth it.

As you can see in the picture, the speed of both the fans are reported in two registers. When the on/off beahviour started again, one of the speed fan was always zero regardless the speed level. What I personally think is that when the EC cannot read the fan speed it progressively increase the, let me say, "control signal" (PWM duty cycle), hoping to see some feedback from the fans. If it is not able to see any feedback, it use the "maximum control signal" in any case thus causing the on/off behaviour. Just to be clear, the EC is the actual controller of the fans, any other possible software that claims to be able to control the fan, just set the speed level registry and nothing more. It is the EC that is responsible for bringing the fans spinning at that speed level.

Finally, what I suggest to do is to use the tool to see if both the fans report their speed. If they don't, it is an hardware fault and don't expect that any bios update, windows re-installation or whatever will fix it.

Note: When the Nvidia card is active one of the fan is stopped. Again, I think this is wanted behaviour but I'm not 100% sure. Please let me know if you can confirm this.

P.S. Surprisingly, my asus is working again as expected since two week (and counting....).

Click to expand...

Actually, it seems like both fans are controlled differently and it is possible to see only 1 fan working at a time (say if your Nvida GPU is off, but CPU is hot) and therefore you will only have one fan reporting speed.

That register of 0x97 seems to be some sort of a fan speed control register, whatever it is (I haven't really investigated).

If you feel adventurous, you can install Linux (Ubuntu for example) and using acpi_call kernel modules you can control the fan using ACPI calls I mentioned in the above thread. If you want to write and read EC values on Linux you can use acer_ec.pl (google for it or get from above thread)

Embedded controller on UX32VD/UX21/UX31/UX32V/UX31A is ITE IT8572G (here is a photo: UX21 EC), but it seems like ASUS uses very similar one (atleast they behave in the same manner) across all laptops in past 4 years. I have an old Asus W7SG and it has ITE IT8511TE-BXS Embedded Controller which is idential to IT8510G. You can get datasheet right here. Now, using ACPI calls of:

You can read the actual memory/configuration of Embedded Controller and compare it with the datasheet to find out how the EC is configured. For example, say I want to find out which mode the Fan1 is in. I look at the datasheet on page 225 under "7.11.4.8 Fan 1 Configuration Register (FAN1CNF)" you can see it is at offet of 0x10 with the base address of 0x1800 (from page 221), therefore we need to read the memory at 0x1800 + 0x10 = 0x1810. Lets do the ACPI call:

Code:

\_SB.PCI0.LPCB.EC0.RRAM 0x1810

which returns 0x0 and according to the datasheet (page 225) it means that the fan is in Smart Auto, on PWM Channel0 and SpinUp time of 00sec. Now, there is a method to control the fan mode using ACPI call (described in my thread linked above, specifically \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.EC0.SFNV) and it writes/reads to the EC at address of 0x521 (Fan1) and 0x522 (Fan2). Now, actually changing those values DOES NOT change the fan mode at address of 0x1810, and upon further investigation it seems like the fans are NOT controlled by the built-in logic of the EC, but are controlled by some sort of EC firmware which is loaded in EC RAM (address of 0x521 according to page 9 would be in Scratch RAM, which is 0x0 to 0x800), which is why ACPI writes to 0x521 for Fan1, instead of to 0x1810 as you would expect based on the datasheet.

Anyway, it was a small little fun project for me to figure out how this all works in hardware.

I think the easiest, dumbest and most fail-safe way to control the fan would be to use the QMOD ACPI method to limit the maximum speed. For example, if the CPU/GPU temperature is below 60C, set max fan speed to 0x0. If it is >60C, then set is to 0x50, >65 = 0x60, >70 = 0xff (maximum speed). Or something like that. The most perfect way would be to change the fan on temperature values in the BIOS (modify the actual BIOS).

Actually, it seems like both fans are controlled differently and it is possible to see only 1 fan working at a time (say if your Nvida GPU is off, but CPU is hot) and therefore you will only have one fan reporting speed.

That register of 0x97 seems to be some sort of a fan speed control register, whatever it is (I haven't really investigated).

If you feel adventurous, you can install Linux (Ubuntu for example) and using acpi_call kernel modules you can control the fan using ACPI calls I mentioned in the above thread. If you want to write and read EC values on Linux you can use acer_ec.pl (google for it or get from above thread)

Embedded controller on UX32VD/UX21/UX31/UX32V/UX31A is ITE IT8572G (here is a photo: UX21 EC), but it seems like ASUS uses very similar one (atleast they behave in the same manner) across all laptops in past 4 years. I have an old Asus W7SG and it has ITE IT8511TE-BXS Embedded Controller which is idential to IT8510G. You can get datasheet right here. Now, using ACPI calls of:

You can read the actual memory/configuration of Embedded Controller and compare it with the datasheet to find out how the EC is configured. For example, say I want to find out which mode the Fan1 is in. I look at the datasheet on page 225 under "7.11.4.8 Fan 1 Configuration Register (FAN1CNF)" you can see it is at offet of 0x10 with the base address of 0x1800 (from page 221), therefore we need to read the memory at 0x1800 + 0x10 = 0x1810. Lets do the ACPI call:

Code:

\_SB.PCI0.LPCB.EC0.RRAM 0x1810

which returns 0x0 and according to the datasheet (page 225) it means that the fan is in Smart Auto, on PWM Channel0 and SpinUp time of 00sec. Now, there is a method to control the fan mode using ACPI call (described in my thread linked above, specifically \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.EC0.SFNV) and it writes/reads to the EC at address of 0x521 (Fan1) and 0x522 (Fan2). Now, actually changing those values DOES NOT change the fan mode at address of 0x1810, and upon further investigation it seems like the fans are NOT controlled by the built-in logic of the EC, but are controlled by some sort of EC firmware which is loaded in EC RAM (address of 0x521 according to page 9 would be in Scratch RAM, which is 0x0 to 0x800), which is why ACPI writes to 0x521 for Fan1, instead of to 0x1810 as you would expect based on the datasheet.

Anyway, it was a small little fun project for me to figure out how this all works in hardware.

I think the easiest, dumbest and most fail-safe way to control the fan would be to use the QMOD ACPI method to limit the maximum speed. For example, if the CPU/GPU temperature is below 60C, set max fan speed to 0x0. If it is >60C, then set is to 0x50, >65 = 0x60, >70 = 0xff (maximum speed). Or something like that. The most perfect way would be to change the fan on temperature values in the BIOS (modify the actual BIOS).

Click to expand...

The tools out don't seem to work on the zenbooks, I can mod the bios's to allow us into that area with the fan controls, But I need updated tools.